The Welcome Table Church, a free christian universalist missional
community, celebrates our 10th anniversary on Epiphany Sunday, Jan. 6, come for
worship at 11 am, and/or meal at noon, and/or public reception from 1-3 pm, at
5920 N. Owasso Ave. one block west of Peoria Ave. behind the Tag Agency and near
Cherokee School. Please share this with others and bring friends, or just the
curious...
This Epiphany Sunday Jan. 6 it will be 10 years to the day since our first
gathering of what is now known as The Welcome Table missional community; so many
changes, so much incredible ministry, still beginning but worth celebrating;
especially an invite to all who have ever worked with us or worshipped with us.
In some ways we began in Weston, Mass in 2002 during the annual convocation
of the Christian Churches within the Unitarian Universalist Association when
during worship and on my knees with hands laid on me by ministers and those in
attendance I was commissioned as an evangelist; this coming just two months
after I had been officially ordained by All Souls Church in Tulsa. But church is
not one person, even co-missionally, and so we really began as we, a group of
nine half of whom had not met one another and one whom was supportive but only
came to lend moral support, met Jan. 6, 2003 in our living room at the time in
Owasso, OK and each week after that one place or another or day or another.
First we were Epiphany Church and met in homes then motel banquet rooms in
Owasso and at Panera Bread meeting room, then rented space at German Corner in
Owasso; our first public worship was Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday 2003. We had
25 people on Easter; the Sunday after Easter we had three people. We could have
stopped then, like so many church plants dying of a premature birth and
inadequate leadership and limited resources and in a culture that didn't fit
with us. But we continued to be open to where the Spirit of God would lead us,
would need us, and so it was through many "deaths to what we had been", through
many steep learning curves.
then in September 2004 in a re-start we moved to Turley, OK and the far
northside of Tulsa in the 74126 zipcode and still at first as Epiphany Church
and meeting on Sunday mornings, then on Sunday evenings; then we became The
Living Room, all at 6305 N. Peoria Ave. in what was originally a mom and pop
grocery store where they lived in the back, and now has been boarded up again
for a few years like so many of our spaces here on North Peoria. But so much
good stuff happened with us there, connections made, from there we began our
guerilla gardening and got a grant for wildflowers on highway 75 to mark exits
to our abandoned place, and started serving the students at Cherokee School then
still open, and coordinated litter pickup days and painting over graffiti, etc.
And we began our practice central of offering a common meal every time we
gathered with and for worship;
In January 2007 we made our big missional transformative move at a time
when we were losing our biggest contributor but felt called to serve our
community and its severe needs of abandonment by renting a four times larger
space across the street on North Peoria and opening up a community center with
library computer center clothing room food pantry health clinic and gathering
space, in which we began to worship rather than having separate worship space
and we worshipped during the week and travelled to other churches to worship
with them on Sundays especially the Church of Restoration our closest northside
UU church. The center was called A Third Place Community Center and started
embodying the concept of third spaces where people of great differences could
come together for the common good, especially in an abandoned place of the
Marketplace Empire, with people left behind and left out, in the lowest life
expectancy zipcode in our greater area. We were still known as either The Living
Room Church or sometimes as just Church at A Third Place.
In 2009 we completed the missional move by creating the separate non-profit
A Third Place Community Foundation to connect with others and partner with them
for renewal in our area, and to be the organizational wing of our mission, while
the church became organic, incarnational, smaller so that we could keeping
dreaming and doing bigger things. Which we did the very next year
In summer 2010 we bought the city block of abandoned homes and trash dump
and transformed it into a community garden park and orchard, and called it The
Welcome Table, after the demonstration garden spot across the street we had put
in as partners with the local United Methodist Church on their property loaned
to us. At the end of 2010 we bought the original Methodist church building which
had been the largest abandoned building in our community for several years. In
keeping a simpler and uniform name, we called the community center project also
The Welcome Table as we had named the gardenpark and orchard project. And so
when we moved into it our church/missional community became The Welcome Table,
with the nonprofit organization still operating connected but separate from us
as A Third Place Community Foundation, the umbrella for our several projects. In
the future as we may spin off new projects and relocate them in new places to
fulfill our mission.
But just Two years ago in January, 2011, then, we started our move to and
reoccupying of the old church building originally built in 1925 on a site where
there had been a church since 1909, where we currently remain, now with a much
expanded food pantry and more space to add new programs like our art studio, and
where our community events like the holiday parties grew in leaps and bounds to
what they were in our previous rented space which had grown in leaps and bounds
from what it was in our first rented space on North Peoria Ave.
When we moved to the old church building we worshipped on Sunday morning,
though could also worship at the gardenpark or at our garden we had put in at
the Cherokee School, or wherever our mission might take us. We had a main
gathering that would start at 9:30 am with ingathering and sharing of lives and
news, then move at no designated time into a study and sharing time often
watching a progressive Christian video or discussing selections from books or
bible study, then also at no designated time moving into worship time for
communion and prayers, which might at times be interwoven into our common meal
time which always follows. This has given people options to come into the group
for any or all of the rhythms, including those who join us from other churches
after their worship or who come for the meal time together only and may join us
for worship or study if we are still engaged in it. Our motto was worship is
more party than program. More like what we think it must have felt like when
Jesus gathered people together wherever he was at meal time. Sometimes still we
would go worship with other churches keeping our connection with them across
denominational lines.
Now at the 10 year turning point we are going to be discerning again how to
incarnate our vision of God's movement in our neck of the world, how to respond
to grow deeper in the four paths of church: missional service with and for
others, community covenanting and life together among us, developing and growing
in discipleship or our personal faith formation, and grounding in worship and
prayer. How can we grow leaders who will help us to go deeper along each of
those four paths, and how can we share our ministry more, and how connect those
four paths with a variety of folks depending on where they are in their
spiritual journey? Can we help foster intentional community, new monastic
community, bringing in new and more people into our core group, and still offer
the permeable boundaries of community worship and service and study that welcome
in folks who are either in other communities or are content with their
involvement with us, who might only want to be with us either during the week or
only at a more traditional Sunday worship time? Can we embody multiple
communities connected together in a radical way, and grow leaders for each of
them? Can we in the next 10 years start or inspire whole new missional
communities in other places and ways both in our own area of service and beyond?
Can we connect to and contribute to multi-associationally with national or
worldwide religious groups, such as with the Unitarian Universalist Association
and the Christian Universalist Association and the Christian Community
Development Association and other missional church oriented groups that can help
equip and put us and our neighbors in the service of God's mission?
Celebrating and sharing our past is a way to let it inform us but also to
let the past be the past, and to remember the great risks we have taken during
the past 10 years that have resulted in where we are doing what we are today, so
that we can experiment and be radically risky in the years to come.
Come be a part of this pivotal moment this Sunday, ten years to the day
since we opened our living room to see who might show up to begin dreaming of
what might be. Especially if you have been a part of us in other way during
these ten years, and may have moved on to another church or found another
spiritual home, your presence with us has been monumental and we couldn't have
come to this place without you. Come and let us remember together, and to
celebrate your time and your presence, no matter how brief, with us. We have
been blessed.
Follow us on facebook at revronrobinson or at A Third Place or at The
Welcome Table Center...
Thanks, blessings, and more to come,
Ron Robinson, a church planter turned planter of missions that plant
missions, in the abandoned places of the Empire.
P.S. I hope to write more soon, though i have written in the past about it
too, of that steep learning curve, and all the things I did wrong as a leader
and church planter, both my first go around in 1991 and this time too. Just so
the only inspiring things are not just the things that get lauded, for it is
most often the other things, the missteps, that have had the most impact during
these past ten years.
No comments:
Post a Comment